Applying for the Colombia Program

Well, we officially did it. We hand delivered our official application to adopt a baby from Colombia!!!!

We met with Denise, the social worker at the adoption agency and talked about some questions we had. We read up on just about everything but we had some questions about referral times, how long the visit to Colombia has been lately, and some financial stuff.

Denise said the referral times have been taking 24 to 26 months - about what we've been seeing from others online who are adopting from Colombia. No surprise here. The stay in Colombia has been about 3 to 4 weeks. She said we should plan on a 4 week stay and the earliest they've ever got anyone out of the country has been 2 1/2 weeks. That's OK - we're looking forward to the vacation part of this process! :)

The financial questions were really just us needing someone to officially confirm our math. It's going to cost right around $20,000 for the whole process, start to finish. Thats about what we expected. Here's the break down.

So now that our application is in, we're just waiting on the official stamp of approval from the adoption agency. After that, we'll have some meetings and we'll fill out some more paperwork and get our home study started.

Of course there's lots of details we're leaving out but we'll hit those as they come. Basically, we'll do a bunch of paperwork for the next several months and then wait 24 to 26 months for a "referral" (assignment of a baby to us). We'll hop a plane to Colombia a few weeks after that and stay down there for a month. Then we'll be home with our new little baby!! All in all, about 3 years from now. Seems like a long time to wait (and it is) but it'll be worth it.

The application itself wasn't too difficult. There was all the standard "form" stuff, a number of medical questions (some medical problems can exclude you ), and some short essay questions. Hopefully we don't run into any problems and we can keep the ball rolling.